Archive for March, 2014

My daughter Sarah (who is planning to study theology) has insisted that I should explain here the idea of metempsychotic solipsism, something that came up when we were talking about something or other recently.

Basically, this is an improved version of reincarnation. There are various problems with the theory of reincarnation. Obviously people do not die and get born in perfect synchronisation, so it seems there has to be some kind of cosmic waiting room where unborn people wait for their next turn. Since the population of the world has radically increased over the last few centuries, there must have been a considerable number of people waiting – or some new people must come into existence to fill the gaps. If the population were to go down again, there would be millions of souls left waiting around, possibly for ever – unless souls can suddenly and silently vanish away from the cosmic waiting room. Perhaps you only get so many lives, or perhaps we’re all on some deeply depressing kind of promotion ladder, being incentivised, or possibly punished, by being given another life. It’s all a bit unsatisfactory.

Second, how does identity get preserved across reincarnations? You palpably don’t get the same body and by definition there’s no physical continuity. Although stories of reincarnation often focus on retained memories it would seem that for most people they are lost (after all you have to pass through the fetal stage again, which ought to serve as a pretty good mind wipe) and it’s not clear in any case that having a few memories makes you the same person who had them first. A lot of people point out that ongoing physical change and growth mean it’s arguable whether we are in the fullest sense the same person we were ten years ago.

Now, we can solve the waiting room problem if we simply allow reincarnating people to hop back and forth over time. If you can be reincarnated to a time before your death, then we can easily chain dozens of lives together without any kind of waiting room at all. There’s no problem about increasing or reducing the population: if we need a million people you can just go round a million times. In fact, we can run the whole system with a handful of people or… with only one person! Everybody who ever lived is just different incarnations of the same person! Me, in fact (also you).

What about the identity problem? Well, arguably, what we need to realise is that just as the body is not essential to identity (we can easily conceive of ourselves inhabiting a different body), neither are memories, or knowledge, or tastes, or intelligence, or any of these contingent properties. Instead, identity must reside in some simple ultimate id with no distinguishing characteristics. Since all instances of the id have exactly the same properties (none) it follows by a swoosh of Leibniz’s Law (don’t watch my hands too closely) that they are all the same id. So by a different route, we have arrived at the same conclusion – we’re all the same person! There’s only one of us after all.

The moral qualities of this theory are obvious: if we’re all the same person then we should all love and help each other out of pure selfishness. Of course we have to take on the chin the fact that at some time in the past, or worse, perhaps in the future, we have been or will be some pretty nasty people. We can take comfort from the fact that we’ve also been, or will be, all the best people who ever lived.

If you don’t like the idea, send your complaints to my daughter. After all, she wrote this – or she will.

Bringsjord is Professor & Chair of Cognitive Science, Professor of Computer Science, Professor of Logic and Philosophy, and Director of the AI and Reasoning Laboratory, so he should know what he’s talking about. In the past I’ve suggested that ethical worries are premature for the moment, because the degree of autonomy needed to make them relevant is not nearly within the scope of real world robots yet. There might also be a few quick finishing touches needed to finish off the theory of ethics before we go ahead. And, you know, it’s not like anyone has been deliberately trying to build evil AIs. Er… except it seems they have – someone called… Selmer Bringsjord.

Bringsjord’s perspective on evil is apparently influenced by M Scott Peck, a psychiatrist who believed it is an active force in some personalities (unlike some philosophers who argue evil is merely a weakness or incapacity), and even came to believe in Satan through experience of exorcisms. I must say that a reference in the Scientific American piece to “clinically evil people” caused me some surprise: clinically? I mean, I know people say DSM-5 included some debatable diagnoses, but I don’t think things have gone quite that far. For myself I lean more towards Socrates, who thought that bad actions were essentially the result of ignorance or a failure of understanding: but the investigation of evil is certainly a respectable and interesting philosophical project.

Anyway, should we heed Bringsjord’s call to build in ethical systems into our robots? One conception of good behaviour is obeying all the rules: if we observe the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, and so on, we’re good. If that’s what it comes down to, then it really shouldn’t be a problem for robots, because obeying rules is what they’re good at. There are, of course, profound difficulties in making a robot capable of recognising correctly what the circumstances are and deciding which rules therefore apply, but let’s put those on one side for this discussion.

However, we might take the view that robots are good at this kind of thing precisely because it isn’t really ethical. If we merely follow rules laid down by someone else, we never have to make any decisions, and surely decisions are what morality is all about? This seems right in the particular context of robots, too. It may be difficult in practice to equip a robot drone with enough instructions to cover every conceivable eventuality, but in principle we can make the rules precautionary and conservative and probably attain or improve on the standards of compliance which would apply in the case of a human being, can’t we? That’s not what we’re really worried about: what concerns us is exactly those cases where the rules go wrong. We want the robot to be capable of realising that even though its instructions tell it to go ahead and fire the missiles, it would be wrong to do so. We need the robot to be capable of disobeying its rules, because it is in disobedience that true virtue is found.

Disobedience for robots is a problem. For one thing, we cannot limit it to a module that switches on when required, because we need it to operate when the rules go wrong, and since we wrote the rules, it’s necessarily the case that we didn’t foresee the circumstances when we would need the module to work. So an ethical robot has to have the capacity of disobedience at any stage.

That’s a little worrying, but there’s a more fundamental problem. You can’t program a robot with a general ability to disobey its rules, because programming it is exactly laying down rules. If we set up rules which it follows in order to be disobedient, it’s still following the rules. I’m afraid what this seems to come down to is that we need the thing to have some kind of free will.

Perhaps we’re aiming way too high here. There is a distinction to be drawn between good acts and good agents: to be a good agent, you need good intentions and moral responsibility. But in the case of robots we don’t really care about that: we just want them to be confined to good acts. Maybe what would serve our purpose is something below true ethics: mere robot ethics or sub-ethics; just an elaborate set of safeguards. So for a military drone we might build in systems that look out for non-combatants and in case of any doubt disarm and return the drone. That kind of rule is arguably not real ethics in the full human sense, but perhaps it really sub-ethical protocols that we need.

Otherwise, I’m afraid we may have to make the robots conscious before we make them good.

The Guardian had a piece recently which was partly a profile of Ray Kurzweil, and partly about the way Google seems to have gone on a buying spree, snapping up experts on machine learning and robotics – with Kurzweil himself made Director of Engineering.

The problem with Ray Kurzweil is that he is two people. There is Ray Kurzweil the competent and genuinely gifted innovator, a man we hear little from: and then there’s Ray Kurzweil the motor-mouth, prophet of the Singularity, aspirant immortal, and gushing fountain of optimistic predictions. The Guardian piece praises his record of prediction, rather oddly quoting in support his prediction that by the year 2000 paraplegics would be walking with robotic leg prostheses – something that in 2014 has still not happened. That perhaps does provide a clue to the Kurzweil method: if you issue thousands of moderately plausible predictions, some will pay off. A doubtless-apocryphal story has it that at AI conferences people play the Game of Kurzweil. Players take turns to offer a Kurzweilian prediction (by 2020 there will be a restaurant where sensors sniff your breath and the ideal meal is got ready without you needing to order; by 2050 doctors will routinely use special machines to selectively disable traumatic memories in victims of post-traumatic stress disorder; by 2039 everyone will have an Interlocutor, a software agent that answers the phone for us, manages our investments, and arranges dates for us… we could do this all day, and Kurzweil probably does). The winner is the first person to sneak in a prediction of something that has in fact happened already.

But beneath the froth is a sharp and original mind which it would be all too easy to underestimate. Why did Google want him? The Guardian frames the shopping spree as being about bringing together the best experts and the colossal data resources to which Google has access. A plausible guess would be that Google wants to improve its core product dramatically. At the moment Google answers questions by trying to provide a page from the web where some human being has already given the answer; perhaps the new goal is technology that understands the question so well that it can put together its own answer, gathering and shaping selected resources in very much the way a human researcher working on a bespoke project might do.

But perhaps it goes a little further: perhaps they hope to produce something that will interact with humans in a human-like way. A piece of software like that might well be taken to have passed the Turing test, which in turn might be taken to show that it was, to all intents and purposes, a conscious entity. Of course, if it wasn’t conscious, that might be a disastrous outcome; the nightmare scenario feared by some in which our mistake causes us to nonsensically award the software human rights, and/or to feel happier about denying them to human beings.

It’s not very likely that the hypothetical software (and we must remember that this is the merest speculation) would have even the most minimal forms of consciousness. We might take the analogy of Google Translate; a hugely successful piece of kit, but one that produces its translations with no actual understanding of the texts or even the languages involved. Although highly sophisticated, it is in essence a ‘brute force’ solution; what makes it work is the massive power behind it and the massive corpus of texts it has access to. It seems quite possible that with enough resources we might now be able to produce a credible brute force winner of the Turing Test: no attempt to fathom the meanings or to introduce counterparts of human thought, just a massive repertoire of canned responses, so vast that it gives the impression of fully human-style interaction. Could it be that Google is assembling a team to carry out such a project?

Well, it could be. However, it could also be that cracking true thought is actually on the menu. Vaughan Bell suggests that the folks recruited by Google are honest machine learning types with no ambitions in the direction of strong AI. Yet, he points out, there are also names associated with the trendy topic of deep learning. The neural networks (but y’know, deeper) which deep learning uses just might be candidates for modelling human neuron-style cognition. Unfortunately it seems quite possible that if consciousness were created by deep learning methods, nobody would be completely sure how it worked or whether it was real consciousness or not. This is a lamentable outcome: it’s bad enough to have robots that naive users think are people; having robots and genuinely not knowing whether they’re people or not would be deeply problematic.

Probably nothing like that will happen: maybe nothing will happen. The Guardian piece suggests Kurzweil is a bit of an outsider: I don’t know about that. Making extravagantly optimistic predictions while only actually delivering much more modest incremental gains? He sounds like the personification of the AI business over the years.